Thursday, August 29, 2013

Little escap(ad)e: Art Immersion, part 2

My next
station on my trip of art immersion was the International Centre for Light Artin Unna. I had been wanting to go there since I first heard
about it, and certainly since I did not make it there when I had my solo
exhibition at the German Patchwork Guild’s AGM in – was it 2009 or 2010?

As a matter
of fact, this leg of the journey was slightly less intensively immersed than I
had originally planned for, but nevertheless very impressive and exciting indeed. Less
intensively immersed because I had managed to not register the fact that this
isn’t a museum where you can go in during what any slightly experienced museum
visitor would consider ‘regular’ opening hours. I had dreamed of spending the
whole day walking from one of the light installations to the other, and going
back to the beginning once I had finished with the round. Instead, access is
limited to three daily public tours, the first starting at 2 p.m. in the
afternoon.

So when I
arrived at the front door just before 10 a.m., all eager to go in, after
getting up just after six and having left my hotel in Oberhausen at half past
seven to get to Unna ‘on time’ I was a bit on the disappointed side. Luckily, there were lockers in the building, and after I had bought my ticket (which was
possible at 10.30) I left my luggage and set off to see Unna. Small town in Westphalia,
and, in the shop assistant’s words, there isn’t really anthing to see except
for the former brewery that now houses the light museum, the public library and
the city’s community college.

It has some
very nice old streets with half-timbered houses and "Butzenscheiben", though, and a protestant
church in gothic style, in which I saw one of the Bosna Quilts hanging by
itself, ‘in the wild’ so to say (meaning: not in the context of one of the many
exhibitions that I have seen already), for the first time.

"Butzenscheiben" make for nice warped reflections -but I have always wondered how the world looks whenyou live inside one of these houses. Does everything get warped when looking from the inside, too?

A Bosna Quilt in the church, unfortunately the bad lightingmade it impossible to get any of the impression that this workcould have given visitors.

And I did
treat myself to a really nice plate of waffles and white tea, sitting outside
in beautiful weather (and basking in the fact that I knew people at home were
sitting in the rain…)

When I went
back to the museum, time for the tour was finally approaching, and there were
about 12 people on it. In the building, but outside the former brewery cellars
which are the location for the museum itself I saw a (non-lighted) installation
by Brigitte Kowanz. On the tour, we
were explicitly not allowed to take any pictures. The tour was only a tour of
the permanent collection as a new temporary exhibition will open on September
14 and was not yet accessible to the public. Currently, the permanent
collection includes pieces by

While in the cellar, I think I was most impressed by Kubisch’s combination of light and sound in the brewers’s former fermentation tanks, and Eliasson’s installation of pulsating light and water. But as I was googling all these names in order to be able to supple the links I realized that perhaps it
is obnoxious to talk of favorites in such an outstanding exhibition containing
works of only top artists, and truth is that I liked all of them a lot.

As I did
not spend the night I did not get to see Mario Merz’s “Fibonacci sequence” on
the outside of the brewery’s former chimney:

The Centre
is part of a Light Path that extends through quite a distance in the Ruhr
Industrial Area, which, of course, I did not get to see this time either. It
seems like I will have to go back and do a serious tour of art museums and
sites in the Ruhr Industrail Area! Their having been European Cultural Region
three years ago has definitely given the region quite a boost, and there is a lot
out there to see!